harvest – Page 2 – Owlnature

Growing tomatoes this year & some bird related things

The story about growing tomatoes this year… It is a short story, very short… so short, that I already wrote it on my Instagram (owlnatureleena) a while ago.

My precious… The summer this year was not very good for growing tomatoes outside in the garden here in Finland. But some tomatoes did grow! We can still, in November, eat tomatoes that have grown in our garden. So… it’s not that bad after all. 🙂

We had only few bigger tomatoes, but many smaller ones. And again, they had to be taken inside the house for ripening. They were ripening on a plate in the kitchen, for weeks. Home-grown tomatoes always taste so incredibly sweet! They are just perfect.

And some bird related things… I found something that is over 20 years old, something that I missed – something that I thought I had lost forever…

My pendant, my bird! 🙂 I did not believe that this still was somewhere, somewhere safe… but yes, I found this at my childhood home, (where else!). A bronze pendant necklace called Tintti, made in Finland by Kalevala Jewelry. The stone is hand-painted ceramic.

Okay, I found these; my Tintti with its original box and another bronze pendant necklace by Kalevala Jewelry as well. Another bird! A bird called Tampereen seudun lintu, as old as my Tintti, but I didn’t remember that I even had it.

So, I had these in my childhood. I am so happy to have found them! My treasures… I think that these, too, will be in my pictures every once in a while. 🙂 I love jewelry and it can be seen in my blog…

And something I made over the weekend… I was knitting a bit, testing this rainbow yarn that I have. 🙂 At this point in time, another owl. My design – my problems – more fun in the end. I think he needs some fur around his beak…

-Leena

Sweet corn, grape vine, purple coneflower – the strangers in our garden

Now some more adventures in the garden. This year I grew sweet corn for the first time. It was a quite fascinating experience! An experiment. 😀 For a Finn corn plants are rather exotic plants, they are not like potatoes and carrots that are popular and are grown everywhere (and grow everywhere, too). Usually the growing of corn plants succeeds only in southern Finland, and even here the summer generally has to be very good, favourable.

This is how big my sweet corn plants grew, they were grown from seedlings. I took this pic a bit over a week ago when I harvested my sweet corns.

And something about my adventure… I wasn’t at all familiar with the growing of the corn plant, or… with the corn plant itself. – I didn’t know what to expect and what there should, like, be in the plant so that it would be able to be pollinated, and… what the plant should look like – where the different parts of the plant should grow… OK, so I was a bit puzzled with all the stages of the growing of the corn plant.

The only thing I knew was that corn plants need rich, fertile soil, and that I had to put some frost protection fabric on them when it was cold in May. And about the summer… the summer in Finland this year of course was not very good for the growing of corn plants.

Here were the results. Not so much corn… but wow, the plants had so much growing to do! And they did grow some small miracles and even one bigger with actual kernels on the cob. (In addition to these in the pic, there were also three more small miracles and one bigger with a few kernels, but they were already a bit mouldy.) I cooked these corns in the pic in water and we ate these ‘baby corns’ and these real kernels in the bigger corn. They were just delicious!

OK, so, now I know how to actually grow corn plants and what kind of plants they are in the first place. 🙂 And I would definitely grow sweet corn plants again! And I would write about it, from the very beginning… now that I know what to write. ;D

We’ve had this grape vine plant growing in our garden for three summers now. In spring this year we were just looking at the spot where this had grown in previous summers like “will it even grow this year… or ever again…” But it did grow this summer, too, and never before it has grown this big. And what’s more…

…this year our grape vine started to even grow some grapes! Quite amazing, a bit unbelievable. – I have not expected that our plant would actually grow fruits. Now it has two bunches of grapes growing, this bunch in the picture has the bigger fruits. OK, they won’t grow more now in autumn… A bit of grape tasting next, no matter how small or unripe these are. 🙂

My echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower flower for this year in the garden now. I planted my first ever echinacea plants in May, three seedlings in total. I wasn’t sure if I should see flowers this year or not, or perhaps next year, this should be perennial… Well, this is not a perfect echinacea flower, but a pretty autumn flower anyway! 🙂

The other two seedlings didn’t grow that much, the one on the right can hardly be seen in the pic.

But this is tall…

Echinacea was, and still is, one of my dream plants or flowers for my garden, now I would like to plant a few seedlings more of this. 🙂

-Leena

About the fruit trees, new trees and a bush, an unidentified flower…

Our plum tree had last year (it was the first whole year for the tree in the garden) only one plum fruit, this year it has six! And what’s more, last year it had well over a hundred flowers, this year not many more than 20. Cool! 🙂

A nice fruit.

In July our grafted cherry tree started to grow a branch on its on. After that it has grown three more branches. What great balancing! 😉

The tree has grown further its ‘original’ branches as well.

A tree in progress…

A cherry bush now, too, we planted it next to the cherry tree last week.

And a pear tree, we planted it last week as well.

The pear tree has such flawless leaves!

EDIT: This could be gladiolus, miekkalilja in Finnish… I suddenly remembered this name, and it sure looked like gladiolus when I searched it. 🙂

An unidentified flower. – Yet another new flower for this autumn and we have no idea what this could be called. I tried to google it a bit, but no luck with that. It’s a fairly big plant, big flowers. We knew that something was planted in this spot, but didn’t believe that anything would bloom here this year.

Beautiful it is…

And another new tree. We planted this aspen tree the other day.

The autumn colour of the aspen trees is always so enchanting, bright, brilliant… And the sound of the aspen leaves quaking in the wind is lovely.

Populus tremula erecta is this tree.

I got a bit carried away with the colours… Well, autumn is once a year. 😉

-Leena

About some of the food growing in the garden & more flowers

First about some of the food growing in our garden. We had some strawberries to eat still in August – a bit different summer indeed, usually the strawberry season has ended well before the end of July in our garden. Peas, potatoes, carrots and onions all grow easily. The pea season is at its end now and we’ve been harvesting our potatoes, too, for some time now, but there are still many potatoes underground, that’s for sure.

Homegrown food is always just so delicious, and sweet… 🙂

We’ve been harvesting our carrots, too. I took a pic yesterday evening when I was about to make soup.

One of the most delicious things you can grow in your garden! This actually is the first time ever that we’re growing onions. – I wonder why we haven’t done it earlier! Here in Finland, in the north, we usually grow onions from onion sets, not from seeds. And onions indeed are easy to grow from sets.

Come out, come out! This year we have more blackcurrant berries than ever before (-during the three previous summers that we’ve lived here). And it’s so nice! Our redcurrant bushes have been loaded with berries every summer, but our blackcurrant berries have been hiding somewhere. (?) 🙂

More common poppy flowers. Other names for common poppy: corn poppy, field poppy, Flanders poppy, red poppy, corn rose.

Our fly honeysuckle has berries now. Not edible, poisonous.

Phlox paniculata or fall phlox ‘early red’, in the middle of our garden. We planted it a bit over a week ago.

And there is no summer without strawflower flowers… 🙂

-Leena

Growing tomatoes

This is what’s been happening this year: we have grown tomatoes for the first time, we started the pre-growing too late, but we’ve got some delicious red tomatoes to eat. The pre-growing should have started already in March or at the beginning of April. I don’t remember when exactly our tomato seeds were planted, but it was like May already… 🙂

The pre-growing happened in small containers inside our house and the pre-grown tiny plants, seedlings, were then planted outside, in buckets with drainage holes in the bottom. The buckets were placed to our vegetable garden – the all day sunny spot between our house and the woods. The wall of our home was sheltering the plants a bit. When it was sometimes raining too much, we carried the plant buckets inside our house. Everything went fine – the plants or their soil didn’t get any mold. – One just has to carefully keep an eye on the plants – when to water them, and how much. And tomatoes like fertilizing, we always use organic fertilizers.

And oh yes, I just love the scent of tomato plants! 🙂

I took this pic on October 3rd. This was the last day our tomatoes were outside – the upper parts of the plants had finally been frozen at night (and the plants were like all gone, the next day, October 4th). We noticed that our tomatoes actually did like a bit cooler air – they were ripening so well in autumn – they started ripening with the combination of cool air and warm sunlight. And it really was so wonderful that we had so summery September for our tomatoes… because we were so late with the planting. 😀 But oh yes, these home-grown ripe tomatoes that we now have had – they’ve tasted so delicious, sweet… they are miraculous! 🙂

Tomatoes do turn red and fully ripen without the main body of the plant, inside the house (and tomatoes do ripen without apples, and so on… 😉 ). The already red tomatoes, that are ripening to be eaten, we have kept on a table in kitchen.

But the first ripening of our tomatoes – the green tomatoes turning red, happens in the cool and dark sauna in our home. And when the sauna is heated, we take the tomatoes to kitchen.

Our biggest tomato for this year, I took it outside for pics… 🙂

So, now we know what to do in March next year!

-Leena

Coffee, pink flowers, blackberries

Today’s morning coffee pic along with some more pics of pink flowers, taken lately and today, and a couple of pics with blackberries in them. – Pics in the still very warm September here in Finland. 🙂

Other one of my upper eyelids is a bit red, very swollen and somewhat sore today, it started already yesterday. My boyfriend had the same thing a while ago. But my eyelid is a lot more swollen than his was. Nice. Just taking it easy today…

These two flowers I met amongst the shaggy ink caps. We haven’t planted these. I’m not even sure what these actually are – they look a bit like tiny, and somewhat dark-coloured annual mallows, though… 🙂

Blackberries! And I’ve missed almost everyone of them, when it comes to taking pics. 😀 – I’ve just been eating… We planted the blackberry bush in our garden last year. This year we’ve gotten many berries, so juicy and delicious.

Dasiphora fruticosa or shrubby cinquefoil, ‘pink paradise‘. We planted the bush a couple of weeks ago.

A tiny bush to fill the empty space ( a bit too big, and not to be seen wholly in the pic) in the middle of our garden. – This is a start… 🙂 Very flowery shrubs are shrubby cinquefoils in autumn…

And these old friends today:

Annual mallow, one more pic…

And a bit of cosmos…

-Leena

A plum fruit in the garden, autumn thoughts coming, too

One delightful plum fruit in our garden! Our plum tree really has grown and ripened one fruit this year. Well done, wonderfully happened, as this is the first whole year of the tree in our garden. It did have more than hundred flowers in spring, but I was hoping to get only two fruits, because that’s how it goes in the early years of the fruit tree’s life… Yeah well, I was actually hoping to get “any fruit”, so one purple fruit in the tree is a marvel. It looks quite amazing! 😀

My previous blog posts about the tree here and here.

This is even more amazing, because we already thought, at one point, that also this fruit had gone – one day I just couldn’t find it in the tree. I said that to my boyfriend, and he also searched the tree, and said that he couldn’t find the fruit either. What are we? A couple of morons? 😀

All of a sudden then, the fruit was there again, on another day… And it still grew bigger. Then suddenly it started to change colour from green to purple, and once it had started to do it, the colour change happened very quickly.

Wow, oh dear oh dear, I’m grateful! 🙂

So hey! It’s already September! But I’m actually quite content with the fact – the autumn may begin. 🙂 And in Owlnature, too. I was away from here for a while, because I had the moving in and out project, or an ordeal, as it turned out to be, a bit. 😀 – Too big closets to store your rubbish there, years of dirt in some spots in one’s student apartment, and so on, but it’s all over now. 🙂 But I do feel that I should have started, everything, that I’ve been doing now, and that I’m about to, hopefully, do next, already a year ago… Buuut enough of this right now, maybe a bit of reminiscing the old things later, again, and we have to rearrange this whole country home of ours here, too, every room, now. Aaand I still have some flower pics and some other pics, too, from August, that I’ll reminisce here in my blog a bit. And for this autumn I indeed have some plans, other than cleaning the house and everything, too, but let’s see what happens – just taking things easy… but very, very, seriously… ;D – And I can say that it all comes down to the fact that I want to grow mentally and I want to learn to do new things, too. And no matter how diminutive the new things are, it’s always an adventure. – Let us not destroy our inner child!

-Leena